4 ms·

Block graphics and text at 1200/75 baud - say 1 million people online and all busy typing, that's 75 x 1E6 x 8 upstream so it wouldn't trouble a single 1Gb ethe

by hazeii 9y ago

Block graphics and text at 1200/75 baud - say 1 million people online and all busy typing, that's 75 x 1E6 x 8 upstream so it wouldn't trouble a single 1Gb ethernet link. Downstream would be 16 times that, so 10Gb would handle it all. Of course, in practice a lot of time the line would be idle so actually numbers would have been far less than that. Prestel in the UK (very similar to Minitel, also 1200/75) ran on around 10 GEC 'mainframes', which I was 'privileged' to spent many hours around. Each mainframe ran at a whole 1MIP, amd there were seried ranks of disk and tape drives to accompany them. Edit: Number formatting.

richrichardsson 9y ago
I think they were more interested in how the relative percentages of bandwidth usage by type (erotic versus other uses) compares to today's patterns. I'd hazard a guess that people have generally been equally interested in sex over the years. :) Although I do wonder what the gender demographic split was like back then online, again I'd hazard a guess at a greater proportion of males compared with today.
- hazeii 9y ago
  I strongly suspect the interactive (mostly adult) services were the bulk of the bandwidth; the rest of it was relatively short, infrequent and low-bandwidth sessions like looking up phone numbers, catalogue ordering or paying the odd bill. There's some info in the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel#Finances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel#Finances) about usage and finance which quotes revenues of over $1bn p.a. in 1998. I'd guess that while interest in sex hasn't changed, it does seem the bulk of bandwidth on Minitel went on online chat (erotic/flirting) - likely much more so as a proportion of the total than on the modern internet. I recall Paris (and the Metro in particular) at that time being plastered with (mostly-pink) adverts for 3615 chat services (the Minitel equivalent of a URL).

by hazeii 9y ago

richrichardsson 9y ago

I think they were more interested in how the relative percentages of bandwidth usage by type (erotic versus other uses) compares to today's patterns. I'd hazard a guess that people have generally been equally interested in sex over the years. :) Although I do wonder what the gender demographic split was like back then online, again I'd hazard a guess at a greater proportion of males compared with today.

hazeii 9y ago
I strongly suspect the interactive (mostly adult) services were the bulk of the bandwidth; the rest of it was relatively short, infrequent and low-bandwidth sessions like looking up phone numbers, catalogue ordering or paying the odd bill. There's some info in the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel#Finances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel#Finances) about usage and finance which quotes revenues of over $1bn p.a. in 1998. I'd guess that while interest in sex hasn't changed, it does seem the bulk of bandwidth on Minitel went on online chat (erotic/flirting) - likely much more so as a proportion of the total than on the modern internet. I recall Paris (and the Metro in particular) at that time being plastered with (mostly-pink) adverts for 3615 chat services (the Minitel equivalent of a URL).